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on routine patrol that had slipped, undetected, through Allied defenses. A third LST, although damaged, had limped back to Portsmouth harbor. ‘I can see why visiting the memorial is important to you,’ I said.
    She sucked in her lips and nodded. ‘I hate the word “closure”, but that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Hannah? Closure.’
    I couldn’t think of anything to add to that, so I simply smiled reassuringly and returned to whacking the tops off my soft-boiled eggs.
    â€˜Say,’ Cathy continued after a moment. Head bent, she fumbled once more in her commodious bag, coming up with a set of car keys. She plunked them down on the table in front of Paul, although they were clearly intended for me, one chair over. ‘Hannah. If you can drive me down to see the Sherman tank, you’ll be my BFF.’
    BFF. Best friends forever. ‘Your friend, certainly,’ I agreed, thinking that one out of three was the best this pushy American was going to get, at least for the time being. Maybe she was an acquired taste.
    Cathy’s eyes widened hopefully. ‘You’ll do it?’
    She looked so childlike, so vulnerable, that I felt my defenses weakening. ‘Sure,’ I agreed, figuring that there were a lot worse things than a long drive on a glorious English summer day. ‘Shall we say this afternoon, then? Nothing else on my schedule.’
    Speaking of Dads, I was thanking my own, still alive and thriving back in Maryland, as I climbed into Cathy’s Vauxhall Corsa with . . . wait for it . . . manual transmission.
    Back when I was sixteen, Dad forced me to drive stick. ‘You never know when it will come in handy, Hannah.’
    I’m sure he was thinking about rushing somebody to a hospital, or moving a car, fast, out of the path of an oncoming locomotive, or it could even come in handy should my getaway driver accidentally lock himself in the bank vault. But, for me the ‘when’ was ‘now’, in Devon with Cathy, an American I had just met, taking her for a rendezvous – of sorts – with her own father.
    As she climbed into the passenger seat to my left and buckled up, I took a moment to familiarize myself with the controls. ‘Ready?’
    She nodded.
    â€˜We’re off, then.’ Using my left hand, I shifted into reverse, backed out of the parking space, put the car in first and headed for the exit on The Quay near the Flavel Arts Centre. Fortunately, the brake and accelerator pedals are not reversed on English cars, or I would have sent the Vauxhall crashing through the plate glass window of the Visitors’ Center when I braked to avoid a child who darted out from behind an SUV. After the frisky little tot had been chased around the car park and corralled by his mother, we continued up College Way past the Naval College to the roundabout on the A379 where we made the turn toward Stoke Fleming.
    I was feeling pretty comfortable behind the wheel until we got behind an articulated lorry just outside Stoke Fleming. As the huge, double-jointed truck slowed to wind its way through the twisting, one-lane, two-way streets of the village, I grabbed what I thought was the gearshift and instead of downshifting to second, rolled down my window. Next to me, Cathy noticed and laughed out loud. ‘See what I mean!’
    I had to laugh, too.
    Thankfully, we lost the lorry when it headed west on the road toward Bowden, Ash and Bugford. We continued along the A379 hugging the coastline. Just outside Strete, we popped over the crest of a hill to see the vast panorama of the sea spread out below us, sunlight dancing on the water like a carpet of diamonds. There was no one behind me, so I pulled to the side of the road for a moment so that Cathy could appreciate the view. ‘On a clear day, you can see France,’ I told my passenger.
    â€˜Is that Slapton Sands?’ she asked, pointing to an expanse of